érik bordeleau - foucault anonymat - Le Quartanier, Can, 2012

érik bordeleau
foucault anonymat

L’art de vivre,
c’est de tuer la psychologie

Sans doute y a-t-il encore des gens qui ont une vie tout à fait personnelle; ils disent : «Nous étions hier chez tel et tel », ou bien : « Nous faisons aujourd’hui ceci ou cela », et ils s’en réjouissent sans qu’il soit même nécessaire que ces phrases aient encore un contenu et un sens. Ils aiment tout ce qui entre en contact avec leurs doigts, ils sont aussi « per- sonne privée » qu’il est possible ; le monde, aussitôt qu’ils ont affaire à lui, devient « monde privé » et scintille comme un arc-en-ciel. Peut-être sont-ils très heureux ; mais d’or- dinaire, cette sorte de gens paraît déjà absurde aux autres, sans qu’on sache encore bien pourquoi.
robert musil
L’homme sans qualités

La relation entre résistance politique et anonymat est plus que jamais à l’ordre du jour. Une de ses formes d’expression privilégiée ces derniers temps consiste en celle du justicier masqué agissant pour le compte du bien commun et des minorités opprimées. Qu’on pense par exemple au mouvement zapatiste et au sous-commandant Marcos, lequel, dissimulé sous son célèbre passe-montagne, peut se dire «gai à San Francisco, Noir en Afrique du Sud, Asiatique en Europe, Chicano à San Ysidro, anarchiste en Espagne, Palestinien en Israël, une femme seule dans le métro à dix heures du soir, un paysan sans terre, un gangster dans un bidonville », et de cette position ubiquitaire déclarer que quiconque lutte pour la justice sociale est un zapatiste (1)  « Nous sommes vous », affirment-ils ; et, pour des raisons à la fois obscures et poétiques, nous tendons volontiers à les croire.

Une tentative similaire de faire sienne la puissance démultiplicatrice de l’anonymat est à l’œuvre chez Anonymous, une constellation à géométrie variable d’individus et de groupes (n’importe qui peut agir en « leur » nom) luttant principalement pour la défense de la liberté d’expression et dont les premiers faits d’armes remontent à 2006. C’est probablement à eux qu’on doit l’usage désormais emblématique du masque de Guy Fawkes lors des manifestations liées au mouvement Occupy. Conspirateur anglais de la fin du seizième siècle, il a ins- piré une bande dessinée intitulée V pour Vendetta, qui a été portée à l’écran en 2006 et a connu un grand succès commercial. Dans le film, un héros solitaire sorti tout droit de l’âge shakespearien mène une violente guérilla personnelle contre un gouvernement fasciste dans un monde dystopique. À ma connaissance, c’est à Barcelone à l’automne 2006 qu’un mouvement social a une première fois repris V pour Vendetta pour son propre compte. Au cri de « Tu ne posséderas pas une maison de ta putain de vie ! » (No tendrás casa en tu puta vida !), le mouvement nommé « V para Vivienda » (vivienda, c’est le logement, le «lieu de vie») a coordonné une série d’actions directes (entre autres l’occupation d’un ikea) ainsi qu’au moins deux manifestations réunissant plu- sieurs milliers d’individus.
Le mot d’ordre d’Anonymous évoque sans ambages l’imaginaire vengeur et justicier de V pour Vendetta : « Nous sommes anonymes. Nous sommes Légion. Nous n’oublions pas. Nous ne pardonnons pas. Attendez-vous à nous voir. » Anonymous se veut ainsi l’expression d’une puissance de représailles virtuellement infinie, quelque chose comme le côté obscur et vengeur d’une multi- tude anonyme et, pour cette raison même, indénom- brable. Le caractère menaçant de la promesse de justice rétributive incarnée par Anonymous est renforcé par la référence à la parabole biblique du possédé de Gérasa. Dans cette parabole, Jésus rencontre un homme possédé à qui il demande son nom afin de pouvoir l’exorciser. L’homme possédé répond : « Mon nom est Légion, car nous sommes innombrables. » Dans le deuxième tome de leur trilogie sur l’Empire intitulé Multitude, Hardt et Negri reviennent sur cette parabole et se questionnent sur la menace que constitue l’idée d’un nombre indéfini pour tout principe d’ordre :

Pourquoi le nom du possédé est-il « Légion » ? Est-ce parce qu’il possède une grande puissance de destruction? Ou parce que la multitude qu’il recèle est capable d’agir comme un seul homme? La menace que représente réellement cette multitude démoniaque est peut-être d’ordre plus métaphysique : dans la mesure où elle est à la fois singu- lière et plurielle, elle détruit la distinction numérique elle- même. Il suffit de penser aux efforts qu’ont pu déployer les théologiens pour prouver qu’il n’existe pas plusieurs dieux mais un seul. [...] La menace qui pèse sur l’ordre politique n’en est que plus évidente : depuis l’Antiquité, la pensée politique est fondée sur la distinction entre l’un, le petit nombre et le grand nombre. La multitude démoniaque ignore toutes ces distinctions numériques. Elle est à la fois une et multiple. Le nombre indéfini de la multitude menace tous ces principes d’ordre (2 - Negri-Hardt)

La plupart des faits d’armes attribués à Anonymous consis- tent en des actions menées sur Internet. Le 24 décembre 2011 par exemple, la base de données informatique de Stratfor Global Intelligence, une agence de renseignement spécialisée dans les analyses géopolitiques et parfois surnommée « The Shadow cia », a été piratée par des hackers apparemment liés au groupe Anonymous et agissant dans le cadre de l’opération AntiSec ou « Anti Security » lancée plus tôt dans l’année par le groupe Lulz Security ou LulzSec (3). Stratfor s’est ainsi vu dérober plus de 90 000 numéros de cartes de crédit ainsi que la liste, jusque-là tenue secrète, de ses clients, parmi lesquels figurent des organismes comme le Pen- tagone, des forces de police, des banques, des univer- sités et de nombreuses grandes entreprises. En guise de cadeau de Noël, les robins des bois du cyberspace ont ensuite versé un million de dollars à diverses œuvres caritatives. Pour montrer leur bonne foi, ils ont d’ailleurs pris soin de publier des photos d’écran des transactions effectuées.

Cette première forme de rapport entre anonymat et résistance politique, qui concerne des actions subver- sives concertées et plus ou moins ponctuelles, constitue sans doute celle qui vient le plus spontanément à l’es- prit. À cet anonymat de premier degré ou stratégique, par lequel il s’agit en somme de dissimuler son identité afin de maximiser l’efficace d’une intervention, d’échapper à d’éventuelles poursuites judiciaires ou d’éviter de s’ex- poser dans des conditions considérées comme étant défavorables, s’en ajoute un deuxième, d’un type plus profond et plus difficile à saisir. Il redouble à l’occasion le premier mais ne s’y limite pas, et porte sur le mode de présence au monde de qui en fait l’expérience. Un élément singulier de l’attaque AntiSec du 24 décembre porte à croire que ses auteurs sont sensibles à cette dimension expérientielle du jeu entre anonymat et résis- tance politique : sur la page web défigurée de Stratfor, en plus d’avoir divulgué les données personnelles du directeur de la technologie de l’agence, les hackers ont affiché le texte intégral de L’insurrection qui vient, un essai politique rédigé par le Comité invisible et publié en 2007 aux éditions La fabrique et en 2009 en anglais aux éditions Semiotext(e). Le livre, devenu célèbre à la suite de l’affaire Tarnac (4) et du délirant compte-rendu que Glenn Beck en a fait sur les ondes de Fox News (5), a exercé une influence considérable à travers le monde et a trouvé des échos dans des milieux fort variés. (6) Plusieurs mouvements récents d’occupation étudiants aux États- Unis et ailleurs dans le monde ( je pense entre autres à ceux de l’université de Berkeley et de la New School for Social Research à New York en 2009) en portent clairement la marque. Le choix de publier ce texte plutôt qu’un autre est donc tout sauf anodin. Au-delà de son appel au blocage et au détournement des flux économiques (l’attaque du 24 décembre en est un exemple), l’intérêt principal de L’insurrection qui vient réside précisément dans sa tentative d’articuler les deux modes de relation entre anonymat et résistance politique qui nous intéressent ici. D’abord, sur le plan de l’organisation collective, le texte invite à « fuir la visibilité » afin de « tourner l’anonymat en position offensive » en vue d’une liberté d’action maximale. (a suivre...) 

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1. Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Londres, Flamingo, 2002, p. 211-212. 
2. Michael Hardt et Antonio Negri, Multitude : guerre et démocratie à l’âge de l’Empire, traduit de l’anglais par Nicolas Guilhot, Montréal, Boréal, 2004, p. 172. 
3. L’identité exacte des auteurs du piratage ainsi que la teneur politique de leur opération ont fait l’objet d’une intéressante contro- verse qui révèle le genre de problème auquel des actions menées sur le Web sous le couvert de l’anonymat peuvent être confrontées. Un tweet a d’abord été émis le 24 décembre par un groupe qui a rapide- ment revendiqué l’action au nom d’Anonymous. Mais, le 26 décembre, des cyber-activistes se disant près d’Anonymous ont vigoureusement démenti toute implication de leur part. « Le piratage de Stratfor n’est pas l’œuvre d’Anonymous. Stratfor est une agence de renseigne- ment open source (code source libre) qui publie des rapports quo- tidiens à partir de données recueillies sur Internet. [...] En tant que source pour les médias, Stratfor est protégé par la liberté de presse, un principe qu’Anonymous tient en haute estime.» (http://www. tgdaily.com/security-features/60413-anonymous-denies-stratfor-hack [consulté le 16 janvier 2012].) Le même jour, un message provenant des auteurs présumés de l’attaque répond joyeusement à cette déné- gation, dénonçant la tentative de créer des divisions internes au sein d’Anonymous et réitérant la légitimité de choisir Stratfor pour cible. «Nous espérons sincèrement que vous avez apprécié les festivités de LulzXmas jusqu’à présent. Les cadeaux déposés par le père Noël Anon sous l’arbre de LulzXmas ne font que commencer à s’accu- muler. À l’heure où nous nous parlons, ses petits assistants au pôle Nord se préparent à remplir le traîneau de bataille Lulz avec encore plus de cadeaux afin que la joie du LulzXmas dure toute la semaine. Joie qui s’exprime sous la forme de plus de 500 000 dollars qui ont été expropriés des gros bonnets clients de Stratfor.» Après avoir défendu le bilan de ses actions, le groupe rappelle que « n’importe qui peut prétendre faire partie de Anonymous, mais en raison de la nature intrinsèquement décentralisée de Anonymous, sans leadership hiérarchique, aucun individu n’est en position de décrier le manque de légitimité des opérations d’un autre groupe ou individu. (http:// pastebin.com/q5kXd7Fd [consulté le 16 janvier 2012].) 
4. Le 15 novembre 2008, neuf personnes (une dixième s’est ajoutée le 27 novembre 2009) ont été mises en examen pour « association de malfaiteurs en relation avec une entreprise terroriste». Elles ont en effet été accusées d’avoir formé une « cellule invisible » à laquelle est imputé le sabotage d’une ligne de tgv. Au cœur de l’enquête, on trouve L’insurrection qui vient, qui a été versé au dossier d’instruction et est considéré par le juge Fragnoli comme le « support idéologique» des actes perpétrés. «L’affaire Tarnac», du nom du village où résidaient certains des inculpés au moment de leur arrestation, a déclenché une importante polémique. De nombreux intellectuels et parlementaires ont dénoncé un montage policier et une instrumentalisation politique de l’affaire, la presse n’hésitant pas à parler de fiasco judiciaire pour condamner une enquête qui, à ce jour, n’a encore réussi à produire aucune preuve incriminante. C’est ainsi que le 3 décembre 2009, exaspérés par ce qu’une des inculpés décrit comme « les moyens exorbitants de l’antiterrorisme pour nous détruire », les dix individus mis en cause ont annoncé dans une déclaration commune publiée dans Le Monde qu’ils cessaient désormais de respecter le contrôle judiciaire et qu’ils allaient recommencer à se voir. Plus de trois ans après les événements, la procédure judiciaire est toujours en vigueur.

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2qNskJc (consulté le 16 janvier 2012).
6. Pour un point de vue poétique et littéraire sur l’affaire, voir Jean-Marie Gleize, Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (Paris, Seuil, 2011, 176 p.), ou encore Tomates de Nathalie Quintane (Paris, p.o.l, 2010, 144 p.). Ces deux auteurs sont réunis dans un recueil de poésie et poli- tique au titre fort suggestif (la phrase provient du Journal de Kafka), « Toi aussi, tu as des armes » (Paris, La fabrique, 2011, 208 p.). 

Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber insurgents by Carole Cadwalladr @ The Guardian, 8 September 2012

Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber insurgents

Since 2008, the internet collective have hacked the CIA, the Sun newspaper, the Church of Scientology and a host of other large corporations, sparking a global police crackdown last year. But who and what are Anonymous? A radical new form of activism – or just bored teenagers? We talk to some of the 'hacktivists' and the experts who tracked them down in the deep web /by Carole Cadwalladr @ The Guardian 8 September 2012

Spalding railway station in Lincolnshire is not a big place. It takes me about two seconds to scan the platform and spot who I'm looking for:Jake Davis, aka Topiary, the computer hacker who at one point last year was the subject of one of the biggest manhunts on the planet.

For a period in 2011, LulzSec – an offshoot of Anonymous, the internet"hacktivist" collective who came to prominence around the time of the Wikileaks affair – wreaked a trail of chaos across the web. Their actions ranged from the transgressive – they had taken down the CIA's website and hacked into Sony's database and released more than a million user names and passwords – to the absurd: after the American network PBS aired a critical documentary about Julian Assange, LulzSec hacked into their website and replaced the homepage with an article about Tupac Shakur, the (very much dead) rapper, which bore the headline "Tupac Still Alive in New Zealand". During the Arab spring, members of the group hacked and defaced Tunisian and Egyptian government sites. One hacker, Tflow (later discovered to be a 16-year-old London schoolboy), allegedly wrote a webscript that enabled activists to circumvent government snooping.

LulzSec had also hacked into the website of Soca, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, and replaced the front page of the Sun online with a "report" that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead (with a helpful hint for the FBI in the closing paragraph: he'd been found, it said, "in his famous topiary garden").

For a time, LulzSec demanded and caught the world's attention. Their tweets made headlines. Their jokes were retweeted by thousands. And there, waiting for me at Spalding station, is LulzSec's PR guru. "Look out for the pale kid that needs a haircut," he'd texted me. And he's not wrong. He is quite pale and could do with a haircut. And he's impossibly young: just 19. A skinny teenager with a soft Scottish accent who – for a period of time last year, during "the 50 days of Lulz" – ran rings around law enforcement agencies on several continents.

Of course, I already know what Jake Davis looks like, because in July last year, Davis, then 18, was arrested at his home in the Shetland Isles. And after being charged with five hacking-related crimes and released on bail, he emerged into the sun outside Westminster magistrates court for the world to see. Anonymous suddenly had a face: and the face was of a furtive, greasy-haired youth, wearing a pair of dark glasses and carrying a book called Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. If you had to imagine what a teenage computer hacker would look like, this was it.

The episode was front-page news on websites across the world, as a string of arrests were made: 19-year-old Ryan Cleary from Essex; 16-year-old Tflow from London; 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond from Chicago; a 25-year-old former soldier, Ryan Ackroyd, from Doncaster; 19-year-old Darren Martyn (or PwnSauce), from Galway, and Donncha O'Cearrbhail (or Palladium), also 19 and from Offaly, Ireland. The most recent arrest, 12 days ago, was of another American, 20-year-old Raynaldo Rivera of Arizona.

In March this year came the news of how it happened: the FBI had turned a LulzSec member in New York, a 28-year-old Puerto Rican father of two called Hector Xavier Monsegur, known online as "Sabu", and used him as their informant. It was like The Sopranos, but instead of organised crime and Italian hitmen it involved teenagers sitting at computer screens. And perhaps most confusing of all, the vast majority of the main players seemed to be living in Britain or Ireland.

Gabriella Coleman, professor of scientific and technological literacy at McGill University, in Montreal, probably knows more about Anonymous than anybody on the planet. She has studied them from the moment they first emerged as a new political force in 2008, and says that it's no coincidence that so many of the arrests were of British and Irish nationals. Anonymous is a vast, new, poorly understood global force who specialise in "ultra-co-ordinated motherfuckery", as one of Coleman's contacts puts it. And it attracts a huge British following.

In the chatrooms where Anons gather, Parmy Olson, a London-based journalist with Forbes magazine, found the British connection blindingly obvious. Her book, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency, published in America this June, offers a brilliant insight into the hacktivists' world. Almost by accident, Olson charted the emergence and domination of LulzSec, following the twists and turns of the story as it happened. "And," she says, "you could just see a lot of people talking about British things, British television shows, they were speaking with English spellings. You could tell they were British."

Olson met Jake Davis before he reverted to Jake Davis – when he was still Topiary – in the Shetlands. "It took a day and a half just to get there," she says. "And it was embarrassing really. He was one of the most wanted hackers on the planet, and he just seemed so young."

A year is a long time, though, when you're 18. I'd been expecting a socially awkward geek, but Davis turns out to be open-faced, chatty, good at eye contact and not geeky at all, though this may have something to do with the fact that he hasn't been allowed access to the internet for more than 12 months. He's pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer misuse under the Computer Misuse Act and is back in court in April next year. He's also waiting to see if he'll stand trial on another charge: conspiracy to commit fraud (the CPS is currently assessing whether a trial is in the public interest, given that he's already pleaded guilty to the first charge). He's currently at liberty on condition that he wears an electronic tag, is home by 10pm, and lives with his mum (who moved to Spalding shortly before his arrest).

And that he goes nowhere near the internet. His only means of communicating with the outside world is a mobile phone that looks like it was a recent model circa 1995. And the greatest surprise – not just to me, but to him – is that he's barely missing the internet at all. "I actually feel a lot better within myself. My life was the internet, pretty much. It was chatting on the internet and amassing groups of friends. And I had no life outside it. A year ago I would just be head-down kind of walking along, mumbling monosyllabically."

It's that lack of contact with the outside world that has led Jake Davis to me. He helped Parmy Olson with her book, and he seems keen to have some form of communication with the outside world. Because communicating was both his speciality and what got him into this mess in the first place.

"Living in the Shetlands, I didn't understand the impact of what we were doing," he says. "I didn't understand the impact on the real world. And now that I'm here in Spalding, and I've been a lot in London, I kind of see that the world does go round and it's not about hiding in a bedroom."

What seems incredible, even now (and maybe, especially, to Jake), is how a slightly troubled teenager living on the two-sheep island of Yell, in the Shetland Isles – a place as isolated and remote as anywhere on Earth – came to find himself at the heart of a radical global political movement.

But then, maybe that's the point. When I met Gabriella Coleman in Edinburgh she'd spent the previous evening meeting one of her contacts, who lived in a remote croft in the Scottish countryside. "He cooked me pheasant," she said. Olson, too, found that a disproportionate number of contacts she met "lived in out-of-the-way places".

For Jake, living in the Shetlands, the internet became his everything. It was where he made friends and socialised. "It's where I learned almost everything I now know. The thing I miss the most is Wikipedia. I mean, at school I learned to knit. I'm actually a pretty good knitter now." Jake had a somewhat difficult childhood, and that (combined with the knitting lessons) led him to drop out of school at 13, shortly after his stepfather was killed in an accident.

What's surprising, at first, is that he's not unhappy that he was caught, or that he faces the prospect of several years in prison. "People say that prison is bad, but I lived in my bedroom with a computer for years. It's not going to be as bad as that. I just want to go and do my sentence and get my education in there. I want to get a really good education and just read loads of books."

That's if he doesn't get extradited – because he's been charged in America, too, where his fellow hackers are facing up to 20 years inside. By contrast, in Ireland no charges have been brought against the arrested hackers. Anonymous may be an international phenomenon but there's no consensus (yet) on how to police the internet.

What's immediately apparent about Jake Davis (and about a lot of the people involved with Anonymous) is just how bright and intelligent he is. And how the internet is where they find an outlet for their intellect – an outlet that somehow seems to have eluded them in real life. "These weren't just normal individuals who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances," says Parmy Olson. "They really were extraordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances."

What I find so interesting about Davis is how completely he seems to have been let down by the education system. It entirely failed to uncover or nurture his talents. "I literally have not a single qualification to my name," he tells me at one point, and looks rather sheepish. Davis rose to prominence in Anonymous and then LulzSec not because he was some expert hacker – he wasn't; his technical skills were limited – but because he is a naturally gifted writer and communicator. Among other things, he controlled the LulzSec Twitter account, from which issued forth a stream of jokey pronouncements, the last of which had the feeling of prophecy to it: "You cannot arrest an idea," he said. Which may be true, but almost exactly a month later a team of police officers burst into his living room, and then flew him by specially chartered plane to London, a place he'd never been to before. "It was like going to the future or something," he says.

You can't arrest an idea, though. And although Anonymous's impact may have been exaggerated (not least by itself), at its heart is a radical idea: that the internet can enable mass, participatory, possibly illegal action in a way the world has never seen before. Actions that can be controlled by neither governments nor international agencies, and which are decided by the horde, enacted by the horde, and policed by the horde.

According to Parmy Olson, the "hivemind", or getting people to "believe in the power" of the hivemind, is probably Anonymous's greatest achievement. There is no central organisation (though there are organisers) and no official membership. In some ways it resembles that other recent un-organisation, al-Qaida. If you believe in Anonymous, and call yourself Anonymous, you are Anonymous.

And in 2008, it seemingly came out of nowhere. At the time, Gabriella Coleman was studying the Open Source community (the network of programmers who believe in, and develop, free software open to all) and was based at the University of Alberta, which happened to have the largest Scientology archive in the world. And she couldn't help but notice what happened when a video of Tom Cruise being interviewed about Scientology appeared on the internet. A group of online hackers began "trolling" (mocking; trying to get a rise out of) the Church of Scientology. For a lot of people, the video – meant for internal PR purposes only within the church – was provocation enough: Cruise appears as a genuine, bona fide, swivel-eyed religious nutcase. Then things escalated. The church began issuing legal threats against the sites hosting the video, and it was this attempt to police the internet that prompted certain people to rise up and try to defend it.

"What I realised," says Coleman, "is that the Church of Scientology was like the perfect nemesis. It was the geeks' worst nightmare, because it is a religion of science and technology, but the technology doesn't work and the science is pseudoscience. And it's an extremely proprietary religion: they have very aggressive control over trademarks and copyright, so in every way it seemed like the hackers saw how the church was like them, but their evil twin."

And in doing so, they also realised that they possessed a hitherto unrealised power: strength in numbers. Instead of merely staging online protests, a day of global protest was organised. And on 10 February 2008, 7,000 people showed up in 127 cities around the world. They didn't know it then but a new political movement was born. "We are Anonymous," read one of the flyers. "We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

Talking to Coleman and Olson, I think I'm getting a handle on Anonymous, and what it is and what it has done. And then I start going into Anonymous chatrooms, on IRC (internet relay chat), on the so-called "deep web", a place unsearchable by Google. And I realise I don't understand a thing. People just seem to be talking about random crap in acronyms I don't understand. It's confusingly chaotic. There are people entering the room every five seconds, people leaving, people changing their nicknames. And then there's the slang. Everyone is a fag: there are newfags (newcomers) and oldfags (old-timers) and fagfags (homosexuals) and moralfags (those perceived as taking the moral high ground). I realise that I am a newsfag. But I can't spot the plans to conquer the universe between the casual misogynism and the Aids jokes.

It's only on the reporter channel that I find people who can type in sentences and speak a language that I recognise as English. It's where self-selected Anons interact with the press and explain Anonymous's objectives. A 17-year-old called The_Poet, who tells me he's of Iranian parentage, says he became involved because of Operation Iran (or OpIran as it's known, Anonymous's campaign to help activists in Iran following the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009). He wanted to feel that he was doing something to help activists there. He's at school, he says, and he was about as computer-savvy as I am when he found the forum (ie, not very) but now he spends up to five or more hours a day on it. We chat away, and he tells me that having helped draft press releases and the like, and having become interested in world affairs, he's now considering diplomacy as a career. Though saying you're in Anonymous is possibly not the most obvious CV-building step, I venture.

It's late when we chat, around 1am UK time, and it's obvious he's in Europe somewhere, and it's school the next day. "Go to bed," I keep telling him. And I can't help but feel relieved when he tells me that he hasn't done anything illegal. Because via the encrypted chat protocol,Jabber (the first step to communicating with anyone in Anon world), I have chatted to another teenage Anon who was arrested, but never charged. He was lucky. "I was immature and stupid and reckless," he says. "I caused a lot of damage. Hurt a lot of innocent people. I put millions of people at risk of identity theft by leaking their passwords. It is never justified. Never."

But you did it because…?

"At the time, it seemed great fun."

Because fun is the bedrock of it all. "Trolling". Agitating. Taking the piss. Lying to, manipulating and taking in fellow internet users. Making a joke of everything. Jake suspects it's why it's so big in Britain. "Anon humour is quite dark and ironic and is pretty similiar to British humour," he says. The origin of "lulz" is a corruption of LOLs, meaning "laugh out loud" (and not "lots of love", as David Cameron thought when he put LOL at the end of a text to Rebekah Brooks).

It's all about the lulz. On 4chan, the "image board" (like a chat board, but where people came initially to share images, and whose /b/ – or "random" – board spawned the idea of Anonymous), anything goes. Just so long as it's not taken seriously. In fact, 4chan is the originator of hundreds of internet memes and viral videos, many of which have found their way into mainstream media.

It's easy to grow paranoid researching an article on Anonymous. Some terrible things have happened to people who have tangled with them. LulzSec's first collective action was against Aaron Barr, the CEO of an internet security firm, HBGary Inc, who claimed to have penetrated Anonymous and worked out who the central players were. To cut a long story short, he hadn't. LulzSec cracked his email password, downloaded 40,000 of his emails and released them in a torrent online for anyone to read.

Soon after I start hanging out in Anonymous chatrooms, my computer starts running slowly. My phone starts glitching. I start waking in the night with paranoid dreams. Quinn Norton, a reporter for Wiredmagazine, tells me that there is a strong culture within the group of not attacking the press. Even so, she suspects there may be a "cache of [my] documents somewhere, but they're not doing anything bad with them". The main thing to bear in mind if writing about them, she says, is "not to be an asshole".

I tell Jake about my paranoia. "I had that every day," he says. "Every morning I spent an hour doing searches and running certain scripts to make me feel better." But in his case, at least, it comes down to the old truism that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that there isn't someone following you.

When Sabu, the Anonymous turncoat, was intercepted by the FBI, he disappeared offline for 24 hours, and when he came back his story didn't quite hang together. "I was completely suspicious of him," says Jake. "I was just too stupid to do anything about it. The idea that there was a group of Feds out to get me is the kind of stuff that happens in films. And I'm from the Shetland Islands. The FBI aren't going to be using one of my friends to spy on me. That happens in American action films, it is not real life. And it turns out that this is exactly what happened."

It was even stranger in some ways for Gabriella Coleman. She met Sabu in New York before any of the arrests, and immediately she knew that he must be working for the FBI. "I just knew," she says. "There was no way while he was still the world's most wanted hacker that he'd be wanting to meet me unless he'd been arrested. I knew he'd been arrested. But of course, I couldn't tell anyone. And that was really hard."

As an anthropologist studying Anonymous, at times, she says, she felt like a cross between "a detective and a priest". She watched the group take shape from the time of the Scientology uprising, and was online, in the chatrooms, at the moment it hit the big time: WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange had just released the US diplomatic cables, PayPal had announced that it would no longer accept donations on Wikileaks' behalf, and the internet was in uproar. "There were 7,000 people a time logging into the channels [chat rooms] when, usually, at the very most there would be 1,000," says Coleman. "More than 35,000 people downloaded the software."

"The software" was something called low orbit ion cannon (LOIC), and it meant that anyone with a few clicks of a mouse could become a "hacker", or at least a website attacker. Computers all over the world started sending packets of information to the PayPal and Visa websites, flooding its servers with a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). In her book, Parmy Olson explains what actually happened. The PayPal and Visa websites were attacked successfully, but the main perpetrators weren't the "hive": the real firepower came from a couple of individuals with "botnets", illegal networks of compromised computers. Olson suggests the hive was a PR myth.

Still, it's a dangerous PR myth. A few months after the attacks, the FBI began to arrest people: people who had been drawn into Anonymous by the rhetoric, and either didn't realise that what they were doing was illegal, didn't have enough technical nous to cover their tracks, or simply didn't care. There were students, middle-class professionals… Anonymous wasn't just "the stereotypical kids living in their mum's basement", as Coleman puts it. "You'll probably find at least a couple in your IT department."

But when you look, for example, at the stunning visual nature of some of Anonymous's designs, that shouldn't come as too great a shock. Nor the brilliance of its operations in Egypt and Tunisia, and recently in Syria. At its most powerful and compelling, it has leaped to the defence of the internet itself. It was only when Anonymous started highlighting what was happening in Tunisia, for example, after the government banned Wikileaks in late 2010, that the rest of the world's press started paying attention to what became the Arab spring.

It is "political art as spectacle", according to Coleman. And it stands in opposition to almost everything mainstream society holds dear. Individual fame is neither sought nor welcomed. Anons who draw attention to themselves or claim to speak for Anonymous are ostracised. "It's almost like the polar opposite of everything that social media stands for," says Coleman. "They dramatise the importance of anonymity and privacy in an era when both are rapidly eroding. They are the anti-Facebook."

Being anonymous was the source of Jake's power: no one knew he was a kid. That, and the idea of the hive. "Everyone secretly knows that everyone else [in Anonymous] is kind of a lonely, geeky guy," says Jake. "But we all ignore it, and we all play this Anon game where we are all these invincible Anons."

And they were mostly guys. Anonymous is very male. In the Rules of the Internet, which came out of the 4chan site, Rule 30 states "there are no girls on the internet". The previous rule states that "all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents", which contains a grain of truth.

At times it seems like Anonymous is a nest of slightly naive teenagers who are going to get into trouble. Teenagers have always acted out. Now they get to act out on a global stage, where just a few clicks of a mouse could lead to them spending the next 20 years behind bars. It's impossible to generalise, however. One figure behind one of the most popular Anonymous Twitter feeds told Coleman that he is a "member of the 1 per cent". "He's always in Paris on vacation," she tells me. "He's a very, very wealthy engineer and he's extremely careful in concealing his identity."

And on the #reporter channel, I chat for a while to an Anon called "nsh", who tells me that what we're witnessing is "the emergence of a new kind of identity, and with it a new form of identity politics. Traditional politics caters to fixed demographics, requires that participants have continuity of identity, can be located in geography. These are things that can be dispensed [with] online, and have been, with great effect."

He's a bit fond of his long words, nsh, and he likes his historical analogies. The random attacks on websites are really the contemporary version of writing a political slogan on a wall, he says. It's like online vandalism. "But the Vandals," he writes, "got the short stick, historically, didn't they?" He won't tell me anything about himself, but my guess is he's British and studying at one of our better universities. It's probably not a coincidence that both Cambridge and Oxford universities have been targeted in the past two weeks, as part of Anonymous's ongoing Operation Free Assange. If you're going to spray-paint a wall, you might as well do it somewhere your mates will see it. I like joshing with nsh, but I do feel the generational difference. When he makes a joke, he signals it with an emoticon. When I make a joke, he says "lol". I have to say, "Ha, ha!" because otherwise, I tell him, "I'll sound like Ali G. It'd be embarrassing. Like hearing your gran try to rap."

There is "no clear-cut moral assessment" of Anonymous that can be made, says Gabriella Coleman. "But if you hurt the internet, be careful, because the internet may well hurt you back."

In Spalding, Jake Davis can make even less sense of it, even though, for a time, he was it. His lawyers have made him read hundreds of pages of his chat logs as part of his case. "And I just think 'Who is this Topiary guy?'" he says. "He is just full of crap. We tried to do something funny, something political, something ideological, and it ended up just being a mess."

I'm possibly more confused about Anonymous now than when I started researching this article. When I look at pastebin.com, which is where hackers put up the latest data dumps, the results of their latest hacking and defacement operations, the targets seem random, perverse.

"Cadwal, there is always mad shit going on in Anonymous," an Anon called KnowledgeUS tells me. "It is even hard for an Anon to know all that's going on with Anonymous."

It makes me feel a little better. "Ha, ha!" I say. Because Anonymous is something that belongs to a new generation. It's their internet. Their Anonymous. And at my age, I'm just too old for the lulz.

Read more on Guardian website

Anonymous: "Wikileaks è troppo lento" Operazione Par:Anoia, pronti 40 gb di dati @ Repubblica wb, 25 luglio 2012

Anonymous: "Wikileaks è troppo lento"
Operazione Par:Anoia, pronti 40 gb di dati

Gli hacker accusano Assange di eccessivo ritardo nel rilascio di informazioni e potenziano il loro portale: documenti riservati di Fbi, Agenzia Atomica e Scientology. E migliaia di megabyte di dati e comunicazioni in arrivo

TROPPO LENTI nel pubblicare informazioni. Questo il pensiero del collettivo hacktivista Anonymous nei confronti di Wikileaks, l'iniziativa di Julian Assange che rilascia documenti riservati, negli ultimi tempi attraverso canali di informazione tradizionali, oltre che sul web. 
Il Wikileaks di Anon. Anonymous ha così deciso di dare il via all'operazione Par:Anoia, il sito già contiene archivi di email riservate prese dal grande database degli hacktivisti, ed è pronto a rilasciare altri 40 gigabyte di dati e informazioni segrete o protette, relative agli establishment globali. Tra le risorse già reperibili sul portale ci sono migliaia di email e documenti, da fogli riservati dell'Agenzia Atomica sul disastro di Fukushima a comunicazioni interne di membri di Scientology e dell'FBI. Nell'ambito hacker, l'operazione è vista con entusiasmo ma anche con qualche riserva: non è chiaro, come sempre nel caso di Anonymous, chi ci sia dietro. E in che modo possano essere utilizzati gli IP dei navigatori che arrivano su Par:Anoia alla ricerca di informazioni.
Hacker veloci. Par:Anoia è l'acronimo per Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency ("Informazioni potenzialmente allarmanti", recuperate dall'agenzia di Anonymous), e si realizza in un portale nato per divulgare i Wikileaks di Assange ma anche informazioni e contenuti recuperati attraverso altri canali. Secondo gli hacker, molto semplicemente, Wikileaks è troppo lento. E gli accordi con i media, attraverso cui Assange si finanzia e si protegge, rappresentano un collo di bottiglia per il rilascio di notizie riservate che secondo Anonymous dovrebbero essere rese pubbliche con più solerzia. E quindi ecco Par:Anoia incalzare Wikileaks, comunicando di avere una mole di informazioni secretate pronte al rilascio, via web e "peer to peer" per i file di grandi dimensioni. 


Read more on Repubblica website

Luca Taddio - GLOBAL REVOLUTION DA OCCUPY WALL STREET A UNA NUOVA DEMOCRAZIA - Mimesis, Ita, 2012

Una febbre di rivolta sta percorrendo il nostro mondo in preda alla crisi economica. Movimenti di protesta assolutamente nuovi, dai giovani egiziani di piazza Tahrir agli Indignados spagnoli fino a Occupy Wall Street sfuggono a tutte le analisi politiche tradizionali, e si presentano, pur nelle loro differenze, come il fenomeno socialmente più interessante degli ultimi anni. Si affaccia sulla scena della storia un aspetto inedito della globalizzazione: reti autonome di cittadini che sfidano, in modo apparentemente spontaneo, gli attuali assetti del potere. E che ci pongono così una richiesta che non si accontenterà di risposte riciclate. 


 Luca Taddio è dottore di ricerca in filosofia, insegna Estetica all’Università di Udine. Il suo interesse di ricerca prevalente è la filosofia della percezione e la teoria dell’immagine. È autore di numerosi racconti filosofici, per lo più raccolti nel volume Spazi immaginali (2004). Ha recentemente pubblicato Fenomenologia eretica (2011) e ha curato l’edizione di Quale filosofia per il partito democratico e la sinistra (2012). 


 Damiano Cantone insegna Estetica presso l’Università degli studi di Trieste. Si occupa dei rapporti fra cinema e filosofia, con particolare attenzione al lavoro di Gilles Deleuze, cui ha dedicato numerosi saggi e articoli. Ha pubblicato una monografia dal titolo Cinema, tempo e soggetto (2009). È redattore della rivista “aut aut”.

We Are Legion The Story of the Hacktivists - Trailer (Luminant Media, Usa, 2012)

Recognizably Anonymous: How did a hacker group rejecting definition develop such a strong visual brand? @ R. Walker on Slate, 8/12/11

Recognizably Anonymous

Anonymous logo

Anonymous logo from parasearcher.blogspot.com.

The loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals who call themselves Anonymous have been variously described as hackers, hacktivists, free-expression zealots, Internet troublemakers, and assorted combinations thereof. By all accounts the group has no clear hierarchy or leadership, or even any internal agreement about what exactly it is. And yet, as you’ve encountered news and speculation about Anonymous—maybe from reportsabout coordinated denial-of-service attacks on financial institutions that stopped doing business with WikiLeaks last year, or the group’s more recent association with Occupy Wall Street—you may also have noticed its memorable logo: a suited figure with a question mark where his head should be, set against a U.N.-style globe. You’ve also likely seen the visual symbol that’s made its way onto the streets: a Guy Fawkes mask borrowed by Anonymous from the V for Vendetta graphic novel and movie for use in real-world protests. So how did this chaotic, volunteer-driven, non-organization manage to create a visual identity stronger than many commercial brands?

Anonymous traces its roots to the infamous /b/ message board on 4Chan.org. Much of the communication on the board takes place in the form of rapid-fire, freewheeling, and often blatantly offensive images and remarks from legions of individuals posting anonymously, riffing on, insulting, and trying to top each other. The most familiar (and misleadingly innocuous) meme to emerge from this iteration-obsessed corner of the Internet is the lolcat phenomenon. 4Chan has been around since 2003, and it’s hard to pin down when and to what degree some of the people posting as Anonymous began to think of themselves as a de facto entity of the same name.

That said, some of the images and phrases now associated with the group were clearly circulating on 4Chan by 2007, when a rather sensational local Fox News report depicted Anonymous as “a hacker gang,” and offered a scary assessment of wanton Internet cruelty and destruction. The segment included a disguised individual declaring: “We do not forgive, we do not forget,” a phrase that’s since become familiar to anybody conversant in Anonymous rhetoric, and ended with a visual of that headless-suit guy on a motivational-style poster bearing the message: “Because none of us are as cruel as all of us.” (This visual was doubtless grabbed from /b/, where the headless image had been posted and riffed on since about 2006.) The Fox story inspired a theatrically obnoxious video response from someone purporting to speak for Anonymous: “We are the face of chaos and the harbingers of judgment,” it declared. “We mock those who are in pain.” This early video traffics in some of the elements (visuals, as well as what Ars Technica has called a “florid bombasticism”) of what would become the Anonymous image.

Those elements really coalesced in early 2008, when some “Anons,” evidently incensed by the Church of Scientology’s efforts to keep an embarrassing Tom Cruise video off the Internet, began congregating via Internet Relay Chat to organize a response. Gregg Housh, then an active participant in Anonymous activities, was part of this group. At first, he says, the effort involved recruiting people to keep re-uploading the video faster than the Church could take it down. But one participant who had some experience with the media argued that Anonymous needed “a solid identity to present to the press.”

Six or eight people, Housh reckons, hashed out a press release. It read like the script to a movie trailer, so somebody proposed turning it into a video, combing Archive.org to dig up images of rolling clouds and ominous background music available under a Creative Commons license. They kept fiddling with the ending of the script, using Anonymous-associated phrases already in circulation. Another contributor proposed a conclusion: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive, we do not forget.” Pause. “Expect us.”

“Everyone in the channel erupts,” Housh recalls. “Like ‘Oh my god. You’ve done it. You have done it! We win this game.’ ” The script was fed into AT&T text-to-speech software, and became the video’s creepy voice-over. Next the group created a Web site. For a logo, they considered imagery that had been floating around 4Chan and elsewhere, including the headless suit-man. Someone—Housh says the person wishes to remain anonymous—suggested imposing that image over a U.N.-style globe logo. Then a question mark was added where the figure’s head should be. In what seems like a missed opportunity, the Anonymous logo did notappear anywhere in the video. “We weren’t branding experts or anything,” Housh explains.

Guy Fawkes mask

Guy Fawkes mask from OperationPaperStorm.

Fair enough, but the video really is a fine bit of propaganda—with 4.6 million YouTube views—mixing the snotty but intimidating “hacker gang” vibe with rhetoric that not only transcended the nihilistic, but sounded rather righteous. Excited by their surprisingly large audience, participants in Anonymous’ anti-Scientology efforts decided to organize in-person protests—a challenge, since they were already being accused of various illegal activities. (The Church of Scientology eventually outed Housh, and pressed a variety of criminal charges against him; those were ultimately settled pretrial, but today he describes himself as “an internet activist who observes Anonymous”—not a member.)

The need to remain anonymous at live protests led the group to adopt its now-familiar mask depicting a highly stylized visage of Guy Fawkes, an early-17^th-Century British figure who was executed following a foiled plot to assassinate King James I. Though Brits have long used effigies of Fawkes in their Guy Fawkes Night celebrations, this particular, cartoonish representation comes from the 1980scomic-book series, V for Vendetta: A vigilante character wore such a mask while overthrowing a totalitarian British government in an imagined dystopian future. In 2006, the series became a film. Also in 2006, the mask began to appear in a popular 4Chan meme called Epic Fail Guy. According to Housh, the suggestion to use the Fawkes mask as protest gear was almost immediate. But some Anons weren’t convinced that the Fawkes mask was right, so they made a short list of alternatives: a Batman mask, classic masquerade masks, a few others. “Then we called comics and costume shops, all over the world,” Housh says, checking availability and price, and the V mask won out: “It’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s in every city.” (The actual Fawkes had “nothing to do with it, for us,” Housh says.)

Thousands of people in various cities subsequently participated in a day of anti-Scientology street demonstrations, plenty of them wearing the mask. “Videos and images and photographs circulated almost immediately,” says Gabriella Coleman, the incoming Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and author of the forthcoming Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. “It was just so powerful.” And it cemented Anonymous as, paradoxically, a recognizable phenomenon.

Why has this particular set of signifiers stuck? For starters, the visuals simply look cool—headless-suit-guy and the Fawkes mask are both stark, simple, and vaguely ominous in a way that’s compelling. The suit-man juxtaposed against the U.N. map is also a cleverly subversive, and ironic, appropriation and exploitation of paranoia about Big Brother-style faceless power. Particularly when paired with Anonymous’ over-the-top rhetoric, it suggests that the most powerful entity on earth isn’t a corporation or a totalitarian regime: It’s something so amorphous that the person next to you on the subway could be part of it. And the Fawkes mask, with its hard-to-read expression and mild air of menace, extends that idea into the public sphere; at a time when privacy seems under threat, it’s a tool for mixing free expression with personal secrecy—which might be one of the few propositions that participants in the Anonymous phenomenon agree upon.

Today the headless-man/U.N. globe logo appears on the widely followed @AnonOps Twitter account (and blog). The image also showed up for a time on the Web site of Syria’s Ministry of Defense—apparently hacked in an Anonymous effort that resulted in an incendiary anti-government message briefly replacing the official content. @YourAnonNews (and a relatedTumblr) uses the Fawkes mask, as does @GroupAnon. And of course the mask has been worn by street protesters who supported WikiLeaks last year, and by many participants in this year’s Occupy Wall Street actions. Versions of both symbols also appear in this recent Spanish-language video as well as in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary on the Anonymous phenomenon.

These examples reveal that the iconography of Anonymous is highly accessible: If there is a Grand Conspiracy, you don’t have to fear it—in fact, you can join it! But both Housh and Coleman underscore a vital point about the visual identity of an entity with no real structure: All these examples borrow from the same set of images and tropes—but almost always tweak them in some way. “With Anonymous,” Housh says, “you can only make suggestions.” People will pick up and riff on the stuff they like—and ignore whatever they don’t.

“It’s very meme-like,” observes Coleman, who is now researching a book about Anonymous and has studied its distinctly nonhierarchical decision-making process. (Housh also reportedlyhas a book in the works.) Coleman has argued that Anonymous’ visual branding has enhanced the group’s power—and may even have been essential in binding together people who resist being bound to anything, or anyone. It’s impossible to say whether any given person wearing a Fawkes mask to an Occupy event is “part of” Anonymous, which after all has no official membership structure. Possibly some wearers aren’t even familiar with Anonymous. But even that ambiguity seems to play to the strength of this visual identity. Participants in Anonymous who Coleman has interviewed don’t seem put off by seeing their symbols go mainstream; instead, she describes their attitude as a kind of proprietary pride with an irony of its own: “That’s me.”